By DEROY MURDOCK | National Review
June 26, 2015
(Joe
Raedle/Getty)
‘My hope is that by removing a symbol that divides us, we
can move forward as a state in harmony,” Governor Nikki Haley (R., S.C.) said Monday,
in the aftermath of the terrorist massacre perpetrated
by über-racist Dylann Storm Roof.
Haley, a rising Republican star, is correct to lower the
Confederate flag. It has reflected Democratic racial oppression since it was
stitched together in 1861, and has been hoisted by Democrats ever since. Just
as Republicans — led by President Abraham Lincoln — valiantly crushed the
Democrat-run Confederacy, Republicans proudly should banish the Stars and Bars
to private property and history museums. They also should remind Americans that
Democrats waved this frightful banner until very recently.
Images like this one perpetuate the Left’s
relentless lie that
the Confederate flag is a Republican creation, rather than a Democratic
invention.
As the Civil War began, the Army of Northern Virginia,
led by eventual Democratic activist Robert
E. Lee, adopted the battle flag that is under contention today. It became the
secessionists’ national banner in 1863. Its designer, William T.
Thompson, praised it
in the Savannah Daily Morning News that May 4:
As a national emblem, it is significant of our higher
cause, the cause of a superior race, and a higher civilization contending
against ignorance, infidelity, and barbarism. Another merit in the new flag is,
that it bears no resemblance to the now infamous banner of the Yankee vandals.
Two years later, that flag was in tatters. The North beat
the South, and the Confederacy was gone with the wind.
How did this symbol of a pro-slavery breakaway republic
wind up atop South Carolina’s state capitol? As the debate raged over civil
rights in 1961, the Democratic legislature under Governor Ernest “Fritz”
Hollings, a Democrat, raised the Stars and Bars to mark the “Confederate War
Centennial.”
About that time, Hollings presented a
Confederate flag to President John F. Kennedy, another Democrat.
Of course, Democratic U.S. senators such as former KKK
Grand Cyclops Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Tennessee’s Albert Gore Sr. (father
of you know who), and Arkansas’s J. William Fulbright (Bill Clinton’s mentor)
stood shoulder to shoulder with Hollings and other segregationist Democratic
governors, most notably Arkansas’s Orval Faubus and Alabama’s George Wallace.
(Wallace installed the
rebel flag over his statehouse in 1963, the day before Attorney General Robert
F. Kennedy arrived to discuss integration.) While Byrd and Company filibustered
the Civil Rights Act of 1964, these state executives blocked schoolhouse doors
to exclude blacks.
Illinois’s Republican senator Everett Dirksen finally
broke the bigoted Democrats’ filibuster and got the Civil Rights Act approved
for the signature of Democratic president Lyndon Johnson.
As a Democratic governor, Bill Clinton in 1987 signed Act
116, which concerned his state banner. It read:
“The blue star above the word ‘ARKANSAS’ is to commemorate the Confederate
States of America.”
When Bill ran for president, some of his political
paraphernalia featured Confederate flags. So did some of Hillary’s
presidential-campaign buttons in 2008.
Former governor Howard Dean (D., Vt.) told the Democratic
National Committee in 2003 that “white folks in the South who drive pickup
trucks with Confederate-flag decals on the back ought to be voting with us.”
That November, Dean declared:
“I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their
pickup trucks.” Two years later, he became chairman of the Democratic National
Committee.
Meanwhile, back in South Carolina, Democratic
gubernatorial nominee Jim Hodges huddled in
May 1998 with the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens. “Hodges
got right to the point,” reported the
newspaper the State. “He said that, as governor, he would not
initiate any action to bring the banner down.”
Hodges won.
Two years later, the state legislature passed and Hodges
signed a proposal first offered by his GOP predecessor, David Beasley. The
Confederate banner was removed from the capitol dome and flown beside a
Confederate memorial on the legislature’s lawn.
So, now, Republican Haley has united Republicans and
Democrats, both black and white, to complete what Republican Beasley began and
reverse the insult started under Democrat Hollings.
Excellent!
The Left insists that Americans recognize racism today
and acknowledge its stain on our history. We already do this daily, from
private discussions to national conversations (Ferguson, Baltimore),
motion pictures (12 Years a Slave, Selma), and even Black
History Month. To that end, Democrats should stop flinging their Confederate
flag onto the Grand Old Party. Instead, knock-kneed Republicans should steel
themselves for once and demand that Democrats concede that they
invented this intimidating standard and deployed it for more than a century to
keep blacks down.
DEROY MURDOCK is a
Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a contributing editor of National Review Online.